[I’m teaching biomedical ethics this semester and so revisiting some posts on innovation and progress.]
Current infant mortality rates are less than half of one percent, and it is awful for parents who lose a child. But in the 1700s, infant mortality rates were over 50%.
I came across this in Robert K. Massie’s Catherine the Great: Peter the Great (1682-1725) and his wife had twelve children — “six boys and six girls, only two of whom survived past age seven” (p. 29). Both survivors were girls, one of whom became the Empress Elizabeth.
Other prominent examples:
* The historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was the only one of six sons to survive to adulthood.
* Wolfgang Mozart (1756–1791) had six siblings, and five of them died in infancy.
* The composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) had thirteen brothers and sisters, and nine died in infancy.
The great reduction since then is thanks to modern medicine. Yet modern medicine depends on two things: lots of wealth and lots of free and vigorous scientific inquiry. Wealth in turns depends on economic freedom. Worth keeping in mind when evaluating those forces now at work to limit speech and control business.
Related: The Enlightenment Vision.
Biomed students should be encouraged to walk through old cemeteries (like Dundurn cemetery here in Hamilton). Seeing the tombstones for children, sometimes multiple children from same family, is heart wrenching and should make us grateful for advances in hygiene, sewage treatment, antibiotics and penicillin.
…and vaccines.